Funny things are happening at Harvard. Just ask Kathy Delaney-Smith, who has been head coach of the Crimson's women's team since 1982. In 34 years, she has seen a lot. But this year she's seeing things she has never seen before. She found one of her assistants and several players engrossed in YouTube for an hour, rewinding again and again, breaking down YouTube footage of a one-handed Steph ballhandling series that ended in a crazy tough shot. "I found myself thinking, 'Well if you've got a spare hour, I know some things you could be working on instead,'" Delaney-Smith says.
The disease of Stephitis has spread far beyond the Ivy League. It's so immensely tough to average four made 3-pointers a game over a full season that, just 11 years ago, not one high school boy in the whole country managed to do it, according to Max Preps. This season, 30 players did it.
On Twitter, in March, I asked if people had noticed players outside the NBA "doing Steph Curry things." The replies were immediate and unanimous: Wrote Dan Shanoff: "I coach 4th-graders and all they want to do is shoot extra-long shots (and, when they make them, tap their heart and point up)." Eric Johnson supervises recess at Ashland Elementary in rural New Hampshire. After Curry's big game-winner over the Thunder, recess became all about making that shot. "What surprised me was that they never stopped shooting the shot ... for 40 minutes. They each had to hit it. They talked about the game the whole time."
Stephitis cannot be quarantined. LeBron James may have had his exhausted heart broken by Curry's Warriors in last year's NBA Finals, but LeBron's 8-year-old son, Bryce, still wears No. 30 in honor of Steph.
It's not all that unusual that, with tons of time on the shot clock, Ole Miss guard Stefan Moody recently used a fancy dribble combination into a step-back to score against Mississippi State in the second half. What's a little strange is that he did so at least 8 feet behind the 3-point line.
